Dean Smith Documentary Pays Homage to Visionary Coach

“Dean Smith,” the new documentary about the North Carolina basketball coach, is purely a homage. The portrait is not of a difficult or meanspirited man but of one whom any recruit’s parents would want to have in their home: polite, old-fashioned, supportive, averse to cursing (but not occasional sarcasm), hypercompetitive, humble, colorblind and pro-education (really).

After retiring in 1997, Smith spoke out against the death penalty and kept helping former players with advice until dementia left him unable to be the Dean Smith he used to be.

The documentary (its debut was Wednesday night on Showtime) is an hourlong valentine to Smith, offered on the eve of the start of the round of 16 of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, a tournament his team won twice.

The closest that “Dean Smith” dips into coaching controversy is his rebuke of Mike O’Koren for criticizing the four-corners offense, or Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s expression of his near hatred for a man he came to love. There is nothing wrong with a documentary about a resolutely decent and serious man, but the risk is creating a film that presents a one-sided view of a major figure in college sports history.

There is relatively little of his voice from archival sources in the film, produced by George Roy and Steve Stern, and no participation from Smith’s family.

“He was so humble that it wasn’t easy to find sound bites from him,” said Ross Greenburg, the executive producer. “We added some more after he passed because it felt a little barren without them. But he didn’t do a lot of interviews. He wasn’t the kind of guy to wander onto ‘Charlie Rose’ for an hour. I guess he never felt comfortable doing that. He was unrevealing about himself.”

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Dean Smith in 1996. In a new documentary about the former coach, who died Feb. 7, there is relatively little of Smith's voice from archival sources. “He was so humble that it wasn’t easy to find sound bites from him,” said Ross Greenburg, the executive producer.CreditDoug Pensinger/Getty Images

And while Smith’s family gave its backing to the documentary, his survivors chose not to give interviews.

“They’re very private,” Greenburg said. “They told U.N.C. that we were blessed to do the film, and they got behind it.”

Their absence is felt even as one can understand their reticence to talk about Smith during his dying days or shortly after he died on Feb. 7.

Still, it would have been valuable to hear about him away from the court to grasp what sort of toll 36 years of coaching North Carolina had on his family. A man of probity and achievement is more than his public persona, but that is what viewers get in “Dean Smith.”

He didn’t mind riling opponents or his players by slowing games down with the four-corners offense. He recruited Charlie Scott as the first black player on the North Carolina team. He was the motivator who instructed his players to point to the player who assisted them on a basket. And he was the spoilsport who wouldn’t let Sports Illustrated photograph Michael Jordan for its cover as one of the Tar Heels’ starters because he was a freshman.

The task of breathing life into Smith as a documentary subject is left largely to those who played for him, a list that includes Jordan, Scott, O’Koren, James Worthy, J. R. Reid, Hubert Davis, Eric Montross, Phil Ford, Antawn Jamison, Mitch Kupchak and Bob Bennett. They do their job as well as possible, recalling a man they clearly loved who seems to have inspired them with decency but not flamboyance.

A documentary about Bob Knight would be a very different product.

One issue that gets a bit of play in the film is an academic fraud scandal at North Carolina; for nearly two decades, the university allowed students — about half of them athletes — to take phony courses and receive artificially high grades from the African and Afro-American studies department. Although the fraud began while Smith was still coaching, the investigation did not ensnare him.

“We had to include that,” Greenburg said. “But the scandal didn’t touch him. The African-American studies department ran amok without him knowing.”